After drinking gallons of soup in February, I decided March was not worth my while and went into hibernation to wait for the weather to beak a little. Cooking and thinking and typing, after all, require a brain and a body that isn’t frozen. Or flu-ridden.

That’s right. I spent most of March in the company of various bacteria and viruses, feeling very sorry for myself and generally kicking up a great fuss whenever Tanmoy was within ear-shot. The poor man had no respite from my cold. I moaned and groaned and wheezed and coughed and sniffed and sneezed. He ran to comfort me every single time. To give us a glimpse of what the future might hold for the two of us, some of the bacteria made themselves at home in my ears and for a week, I was quite deaf. I think that was the part Tanmoy rather enjoyed. Continue reading →

I can not remember when I started reading or why. If it is true that children ape their parents, then it is natural that I did. My father was to be always found with a book – whether at lunch, or in the moments he had snatched from the day for himself. All he wanted on Sunday afternoons was to be stretched out on the comfortable arm-chair with a book, with no one talking to him. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for little girls to leave their father alone on a Sunday afternoon? We got unceremoniously shooed off if we persisted in bothering him.

Our old ancestral home where I grew up was overflowing with books – books amassed by generations of Pendharkars that had lived there, starting from my Great Grandfather. There have been ardent readers in my family for generations and they all seemed to have believed in buying a lot of books. In that era, it was common to send your kids to the big town for higher education and more often than not, if there were relatives in the big town, that’s where they stayed. A multitude of my Grandfather’s and father’s cousins have called the place their home at some time or another and have enriched it by leaving behind books that they could not carry away. And because the contributors were so varied and so many, the collection contains books of an astounding variety. Continue reading →

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It seems quite incredible that we have been married for 2 whole years now. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were still dating? And yet, it also seem like we’ve been married for ever. Married or otherwise, we have known each other for 13 years, which, I keep telling Tanmoy, can not be a very auspicious number.

We’ve been friends for so long that when we got married, it was actually pretty weird. Before the weirdness of the situation could fully hit us, Tanmoy came to Canada. It was only when I finally joined him 3 months later that the reality started to sink in slowly. We weren’t ‘just friends’ any more. Nor were we ‘girlfriend and boyfriend’. We were now husband and wife, meant to live together always. Those first few weeks were strange – the feeling that this fun couldn’t last, that either his parents or mine were going discover us and be horrified to find us living together and order us back to our respective homes (much chastised) wouldn’t go away. That it never happened still seems somewhat strange to me, but we slowly got used to the idea that my parents now actually wanted me to ‘live with a boy’ (hawwww) and his weren’t checking on him to see if he was with me! Continue reading →

This is one dish I am proud of. I mean, really proud of. Considering its me we are talking about, I usually feel proud of every single dish that I manage to cook, simply because I got off my lazy bum and cooked something. But if I were to disregard these rock bottom expectations that I have from myself, and actually start feeling proud only for real achievements, then this dish is at the top of the short list. Why, you ask? Because it is my creation, that’s why. That’s right, you heard me. No kidding, better believe it all you disbelievers.

I’ll tell you how it came about. I read somewhere about one-dish meals – where the one dish contains everything that a meal should, and as you will have guessed by now, the idea totally caught my attention. Continue reading →

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We all have our lazy days. Some of us more than others, and I guess my name must be pretty high on the lazy people database. On most days, I am in no mood to cook dinner. Summer offers many options to eat out, but with winter setting in in earnest now, its so much effort to bundle up and go out in the cold to eat (and if its snowing, there’s the added job of scraping the snow from the windshield) that suddenly staying in starts to look very tempting. But alas, eat we must. And tasty it must be (there is absolutely no compromise on that). Continue reading →